7 the Sands of Dee 3 4 Estuarine Excursions in Liminal Space 5 6 Les Roberts 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Come Friendly Bombs

1 2 7 The Sands of Dee 3 4 Estuarine excursions in liminal space 5 6 Les Roberts 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Come friendly bombs . 14 (John Betjeman) 15 16 17 Decoys, oblivion, modern nature 18 19 During the Second World War the port city of Liverpool on the Mersey Estuary 20 was the target of frequent bombing raids by the Luftwaffe. The city’s strategic 21 importance meant that Liverpool and nearby locations such as Bootle and Birk- 22 enhead suffered some of the heaviest bombing in the UK, second only to London 23 in the scale of its devastation and human toll. As part of military efforts to miti- 24 gate the impact of the bombing, decoys were established on and around the 25 Wirral peninsula, including several at locations on the Dee Estuary. The most 26 northerly of these was situated on Hilbre, one of the three rocky islands at the 27 mouth of the estuary. Others included Heswall decoy, designed to trick the Luft- 28 waffe pilots into thinking they were bombing the north docklands area of Liver- 29 pool, and, further south along the Wirral side of the estuary, Burton Marsh 30 decoy, which was a decoy for Garston Docks in the south of Liverpool. During 31 the hours of darkness this flat expanse of marshland, stretching out towards the 32 mud flats and river on the far side of the estuary in North Wales, was trans- 33 formed into a littoral space of performance. Rigged up with poles, wires, electric 34 lights and bonfires the marshland terrain, with its tangle of gullies and ponds, 35 reflected the dance of illumination up into the night sky, creating the smoke and 36 mirrors illusion of a populous industrial landscape plunged into incendiary 37 chaos.1 38 If the aerial perspective framed an ostensibly cartographic space of illusion, 39 views of the marshland decoy obtainable at ground level were of a landscape 40 reconstructed (re- staged) as mise- en-scène. Indeed, in the absence of photo- 41 graphic evidence it is as a film set that this historical spectacle offers itself up to 42 the imagination: a space of artifice that could just as well have been presided 43 over by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (of whom more later) as by a 44 military strategist. The allusion to cinema in relation to the bomb decoys is ren- 45 dered all the more persuasive by the fact that these ‘fields of deception’ were 273_07_Liminal Landscapes.indd 103 24/1/12 13:29:06 104 L. Roberts developed with the help of technicians from the film industry (Dobinson 1 2000: 25–8). Decoy sites such as Burton Marsh have attracted the interests of 2 military archaeologists, who, picking over any surviving structures and relics 3 help map a hitherto little known geography of Britain’s wartime heritage. Yet it 4 is precisely the performative attributes of these landscapes – their material and 5 symbolic architectures of oblivion and memory; the heterotopic invocation of 6 other worlds: other spaces and times – that makes them so compelling. In this 7 regard the decoy may be looked upon as a metonym for the Dee Estuary more 8 generally. Accordingly, it is as a space of performance – a liminal zone of myth, 9 ritual and practice – that I have set out to navigate this landscape (textually, his- 10 torically and geographically); selected tracings of which form the basis of this 11 chapter. 12 The example of the Burton Marsh and other estuary bomb decoys is also 13 instructive insofar as it draws attention to another defining characteristic of the 14 estuarine landscape: its inherent marginality. Perched on the edge of the land, 15 away from populated urban areas and straddling built and natural environments 16 (and sea and land), the impact of bombing raids on the Dee Estuary (unlike the 17 Mersey Estuary) would, of course, have been comparatively minimal. More 18 pointedly, the example brings with it the observation that the capacity of a land- 19 scape to invite and accommodate oblivion – whether in terms of aerial bombard- 20 ment, military testing, landfill and waste management sites, or environmentally 21 high- risk industries, such as nuclear and other power generating plants, for 22 example – represents one of the measures by which to gauge its status as liminal 23 in the terms elaborated here. The perceived or actual threat of danger, contagion 24 or what Mary Douglas (1966) described as ‘matter out of place’ powerfully 25 underscores the sense of an unstable and precarious landscape. Navigation or (in 26 an inversion of the transitory properties of liminal spaces) habitation carries with 27 it the elemental risk of injury or death. In the case of the Dee Estuary, this zonal 28 uncertainty is further reinforced by the instability of a hazardous ‘natural’ topo- 29 graphy comprised of marshland and intertidal mud and sand flats. 30 Given that much of the estuarine landscape is the product of human inter- 31 vention on a grand scale (particularly that of Nathaniel Kinderley’s River Dee 32 Company – see below), the extent to which it can indeed be described as natural 33 is a moot point. As a partly reclaimed landscape, a product of industrial engin- 34 eering, it is more instructive to look upon the Dee Estuary (or at least those ele- 35 ments that are of concern here) as an exemplar of what artist and filmmaker 36 Derek Jarman (after Maggi Hambling) describes as ‘modern nature’ (1992: 8). 37 Jarman is referring to the quintessential liminal landscape that is Dungeness: a 38 huge shingle bank (the largest in Europe) on the south east coast of England 39 where Jarman lived until his death in 1994. Dominated by the brooding presence 40 of the nuclear power station, with large stretches of the beach and adjoining 41 marshland (marked ‘Danger Area’ on the map) used for military training, and a 42 vast canvas of sky bearing down on the land, topologically Dungeness bears 43 some resemblance to the sprawling estuarine landscapes of the Dee: the ‘empty’ 44 spaces in- between the coastlines of Wirral (in England) and Flintshire (in North 45 273_07_Liminal Landscapes.indd 104 24/1/12 13:29:06 The Sands of Dee 105 1 Wales). Take a walk around Burton Marsh today and, while it is unlikely that 2 you would be exposing yourself to the threat of aerial bombardment, you might 3 unwittingly find yourself dodging stray bullets from the nearby Ministry of 4 Defence Rifle Range at Sealand (a place that toponymically references its liminal 5 status). Trudge a circuitous path across the marsh in the direction of the river 6 and sooner or later you’ll discover the contingent geography that governs this 7 space: linearity has little or no application here; in this environment wayfinding 8 defines a temporality not a geography: routes (such as there are) are as tangible 9 as the footprints (and accompanying squelches) that dissolve into the marshland 10 almost as soon as the next one is made. Look south towards Flintshire Bridge, 11 the vertical landmark that lays totemic claim to the Deeside region, and it is an 12 industrial landscape that dominates: Connah’s Quay Power Station on the south 13 side of the River Dee, and Deeside Power Station and Corus Steelworks to the 14 north. If you make it across the marsh to the main road that serves the industrial 15 zone you will find yourself gravitated towards the cable- stayed crossing over the 16 Dee, only to find that this too is something of a non- place as pedestrians are pro- 17 hibited to cross. 18 In short, this is a landscape that inhibits dwelling, lingering, or even naviga- 19 tion. If its transformative energies translate to, on the one hand, the abstract 20 mobilities of the river crossing (the bridge was described by one local resident as 21 a ‘road to nowhere’2), and, on the other, the threat (or allure) of danger, death 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Figure 7.1 ‘Wayfinding’: Burton Marsh looking south-west towards Connah’s Quay 44 Power Station, showing GPS tracks (in white) of walk by the author, Novem- 45 ber 2010. 273_07_Liminal Landscapes.indd 105 24/1/12 13:29:06 106 L. Roberts and oblivion (the ‘off- road’ excursions through marshland terrain), then to what 1 extent can we meaningfully describe the estuary as a liminal space? 2 Exploring more closely the social, cultural and historical geography of the 3 Dee Estuary we can see how structures of liminality have remained deeply 4 embedded in the topography of the region. First, it is a borderzone between 5 England and Wales, and politics of identity and territoriality have played a form- 6 ative role in shaping the landscape, as indeed have the many routes and connec- 7 tions that have defined and refined its relational geographies. Second, much of 8 the physical landscape may be described as liminal insofar as it is land reclaimed 9 from the river and marshland by canal engineers in the eighteenth century, some 10 parts of which are under threat of re- reclamation by the Dee as the estuarine 11 ecology changes and the wetlands reassert their authority over the dry. A further 12 liminal characteristic of this landscape, one that interlaces the borderzone and 13 ‘sealand’ liminalities, is the interstitial zone that marks the limen or threshold 14 between the living and the dead.

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